Automation systems are dedicated systems used to control industrial manufacturing processes in industrial installations e.g. for oil refining, petrochemicals, chemicals, fertilizers, pharmaceuticals, food and beverage manufacturing, power generation, cement production, steelmaking, and papermaking.
Automation systems can be connected to sensors and actuators and use sequential logic and setpoint control to control the flow and processing of material through the plant. A common example is a setpoint control loop comprising a pressure sensor, controller, and control valve. Pressure or flow measurements are transmitted to the system, usually through the aid of a signal conditioning input/output (I/O) unit. When the measured variable reaches a certain point, the system instructs a valve or actuation device to open or close until the fluidic flow process reaches the desired setpoint.
A process plant can have many thousands of I/O units. Processes are not limited to fluidic flow through pipes, but also include other aspects such as paper manufacturing apparatuses and their associated quality controls, variable speed drives, motor control centres, cement kilns, mining operations, ore processing facilities, various discrete manufacturing machines, and many others.
Besides operations for controlling a process, automation systems normally also include monitoring and supervisory operations, including operations for generating events dependent on various conditions related to the controlled and supervised process. Other sources of events include software applications such as applications for condition monitoring, optimization, calculations etc. Events can be stored in one or more event logs for later retrieval for presentation to users as event lists, and for various other operations such as analysis of causes of events, etc. Events may also be used to generate alarms.
Automation systems typically also include operations for collecting and storing historical data. Historical data are series of values representing the development of process variables (such as measurements) over time. Other sources of historical data include software applications such as applications for condition monitoring, optimization, calculations etc. Historical data are stored for later retrieval for presentation to users as trend charts or in other forms, and for further processing by other applications, such as for analysis and tuning of the controlled process.
In summary, a modern advanced process automation system is quite complex. To make it manageable to develop and maintain and easy and intuitive to use, an efficient software infrastructure is needed, that provides means for effective integration of many and varying software applications, and allows users to navigate smoothly and seamlessly between these applications.
The international standard IEC 81346-1 “Industrial systems, installations and equipment and industrial products—Structuring principles and reference designations” provides a basis for establishing models of industrial plants, machines, buildings etc., by specifying principles for structuring of objects including associated information. In this standard, the term “object” means an entity treated in a process of development, implementation, usage and disposal, and may refer to a physical or non-physical entity, i.e. anything that might exist, exists, or did exist. An “object” according to IEC 81346-1 has information associated to it.
Most objects according to IEC 81346-1 have a physical existence as they are tangible (e.g. motor, pump, valve, building, etc.). However, there are objects that are not tangible but exist for different purposes, for example an object that exist only by means of the existence of its sub-objects, i.e. it is defined for structuring purposes (such as a system); or an object that exists for identification of a set of information.
IEC 81346-1 does not distinguish between objects that have a physical existence and those that don't. Both kinds are relevant for being identified and handled in the life-cycle of a system.
When describing the interior of an object and its interrelations to other objects, it is useful to look at the object from different views. In IEC 81346-1, these different views of an object are called “aspects”. The aspects dealt with in IEC 81346-1 are focused on: what an object is intended to do or what it actually does—the operation aspect; by which means an object does what it is intended to do—the product aspect; and intended or actual space of the object—the location aspect.
Object linking and embedding for Process Control Unified Architecture (OPC UA) is a specification from the OPC Foundation that provides a cross-platform service-oriented architecture for process control. In contrast to its predecessor (commonly referred to as Classic OPC), OPC UA is platform independent.
US 2012/226368 A1 discloses systems and methods for dynamic reconfiguration of an application of a programmable process controller. According to one embodiment, a configuration device reads a new configuration file, which contains information regarding a desired number of instances and desired configurations of modules of the process control application, from its local memory. The configuration device then causes the application to instantiate the desired number of instances with the desired configurations by replacing an existing configuration file of the programmable process controller with the new configuration file.
WO 2010/083889 A1 discloses a method for obtaining authentication information to enable a user to access a secure service provided by a service provider. The service provider redirects the user to an identity provider, providing a virtual address for the identity provider.
US 2002/184348 A1 discloses an object oriented sensing/control framework architecture includes a sensor/controller framework module, an application services framework module, a signal database, and an application database.